


they took the crown

by cryingunderwater



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Military, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:00:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25142791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryingunderwater/pseuds/cryingunderwater
Summary: Peter Pevensie's unit meets all his siblings eventually.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 228





	they took the crown

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Original Suspicious Bastard](https://archiveofourown.org/works/205667) by [burntcopper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/burntcopper/pseuds/burntcopper). 



Peter Pevensie signs up when he turns eighteen, the year after the war ends. He holds a gun like it’s an extension of his arm, and when they fight each other in basic he beats them all and laughs like it’s too easy. When they ship out, he’s vicious. People talk about how he gutted the enemy with its own knife when it tried to creep up on him. When he hears rumours that he’s ruthless, he laughs, says, “You should meet my sister.”

A few months later, just after they’ve finished their first tour, Peter’s unit’s at some kind of fancy ball. They’ve been invited for their ‘heroic’ acts, but the unit knows it’s Pevensie the generals want to meet. Later in the night, when they’re all a little drunk, they see Peter talking to a girl his polar opposite. She’s deathly pale where he’s all golden tan. Her dark locks coil over her shoulders while he runs a hand through his messy, bronzed hair. He’s tall and muscled, she’s petite and poised, but they both have an imposing, charismatic air to them, a way of looking as though nothing could surprise them, a sense that if one had met them a few hundred years ago, one would have knelt and bowed their head, and they would have expected it.

“Ain’t that the General’s wife?” Jonesy asks, peering at the girl as Pevensie mutters something that makes her smile slyly. “The lass Pevensie’s flirting with. Wonder how he’ll get outta this one.”

The girl steps closer, puts her hand on Pevensie’s chest, tells him something firmly. He laughs, responds, and she smiles back.

“Oi, Pevensie!” Marks yells, and they both turn, Pevensie nodding toward the group. She says something and he shrugs, following her to the group.

“Hello,” she says sweetly, smiling around. There’s a darkness in her quiet smile, a weight behind her words, and coldness in her eyes, but by God she’s pretty and they don’t see a lot of girls out in the field. “You must be Peter’s.” The way she phrases it makes it sound as though he commands them all - that he’s the king of the wild, and Marks and Lack open their mouths to dispute this before they look at him and realise that she’s almost right. Instead Marks makes the introductions, pointing the boys out, and she smiles and says how do you do and shakes the hands that are offered.

“And you are?”

“Susan,” Peter says, interjects over the top of whatever she was going to say. “My sister.”

There’s a silence for a second as they all take it in - this is Pevensie’s sister, the one he says is more ruthless than him, a cold-blooded snake in a pretty dress with dimples. Then Jonesy, the most drunk, giggles, “Oh shit.” Pevensie laughs and it seems to encourage Jonesy, who continues, “You two similar, huh? Ya ever killed a man, Missus Pevensie?”

She dimples at him. “I used to get called the gentle one, a time ago, when we all had nicknames. It wouldn’t be very ladylike, now, would it?”

Marks wonders how many of them noticed she didn’t actually answer him, but Jonesy continues, “What was Pevensie’s, then? If you were the gentle?”

Susan looks at Peter, who sighs. “Lu was valiant, Ed was just, Su was gentle and I got magnificent.”

“High King Peter,” Susan says, smiling, her eyes glinting with knowledge. She glances away, says to Peter, as if none of them exist, “I’ll go back to my husband now, hm?”

“Go win the war,” Pevensie answers.

Jonesy gives him a wide-eyed look and Pevensie sighs, then takes notice of the way they look after Susan as she walks away. “Don’t make me start a fight, boys,” he says, picking up a glass from the table.

It’s almost a year later when they’re coming back to camp - blood-spattered, the new recruits giving Pevensie a look and huddling away. There’s a man standing in the middle of the camp - pale with coal-black hair and sharp eyes. He’s armed - they know it from the way he stands, and they react accordingly, raise their weapons and yell to get on the ground.

Then Pevensie - paranoid Peter Pevensie - walks past, slinging his rifle onto a table as he goes, and wraps the man in a bear hug. They’re all frozen, waiting for a word from the captain one way or the other, when Pevensie turns back and says, “He’s a spy, Secret Service, put your fucking guns down.”

A few lower their weapons, but it’s Marks who speaks up. “How do you know him?”

Pevensie rolls his eyes before the man says, “I’m his brother.” He pauses for a second, then grins and sticks his hand out, adding, “Phillip Pevensie.”

And Pevensie - Pevensie laughs. A normal, unrestrained, good-joke laugh, the kind none of them have ever heard from him. 

“His name’s Edmund,” Pevensie - Peter, since there’s two of them now - corrects. “He was telling the truth about the rest of it.”

The boys look him up and down. Next to Peter, he looks less impressive, different, but he still looks like he could kill half of them without getting winded, and the ones who were at that ball suddenly remember Susan, and the look in their eyes, and the way she laughed when Peter had said ‘Ed’ had got ‘just’ as a childhood nickname.

Edmund sticks around. He lets them fight their way into places he couldn’t get into on his own, shadows them and snaps necks and breaks bones as they go, then finds who he’s looking for and fucking destroys him. Pevensie’s less tense, more careless - he lets a sniper go once, and everyone yells till he laughs and says, “Ed’s got it,” and the body crumples on the rooftop above them.

He sticks around long enough that he starts to feel like one of them - when they go on leave in Paris, he sticks around then, too. He and Peter take up enough of the pretty French girls’ attention that the boys grab a couple pokers from the fireplace and try to remember their fencing lessons. The bartender doesn’t care, lets out a booming laugh when they switch to the sword display on the wall. Marks eventually looks over at Edmund, sees him pulling away from a pale blonde girl, licking at his lower lip, and yells, “Oi, Pevensie!”

Both of them turn to him, eyebrows raised. “Go on, ‘s your turn,” he says, laughing, because no matter how terrifying they are with guns or knives, he’ll bet his life that they’ve never tried sword fighting and it’ll be good for the boys to watch them have a go at each other instead of the squad.

Peter looks at Edmund, who’s already slipping out of his chair and taking the sword from Jacob, Jonesy’s replacement. He swings up and grabs it from Marks, and a cheer rises from the bar.

Peter says something to Edmund, and the dark boy laughs and retorts. They circle each other for a minute, trading verbal blows too quiet for everyone to hear, before someone starts banging their fists on the table and yelling, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Peter stabs forward, quick and deadly, but Edmund deflects the blow and laughs.

And then they dance.

It’s fast and terrifying and when Marks looks at the bartender he’s starting to look worried that blood could stain his floors.

Edmund swings at Peter’s neck, drawing gasps, but Peter ducks the blow and rams into him with his shoulder, knocking him off balance before engaging in some complex move where he twists the sword right out of his brother’s hand. Edmund gets an elbow to Peter’s face, and while he’s in close takes the sword Peter had been using and slices at his hip; Peter twists behind Edmund, brings his sword up to Edmund’s neck quicker than any of them can follow.

There’s a second where they all pause; Marks thinks a girl screams a little; before Edmund slashes at Peter’s legs viciously and the older man jumps back to avoid the blow, and then they go at it again, like hammer and tongs, beating at each other until the swords dent, never getting close enough to draw blood but trying so desperately hard.

It's four years later, near the end of their second tour, when Marks catches a bullet in the neck and Jake one in the leg and they have to evac to the nearest hospital. They go in with Marks in a body bag and Jake on a stretcher and Pevensie leading them, but then a tiny girl hurries out, directing the stretcher one way and the body bag another, not even seeming to notice any of them, and Pevensie, for the first time they've ever seen, whoops and lifts the girl up, crushing her in a hug.

She elbows him in the gut and he drops her, laughing, as she turns around with a frown on her face. When she sees him, drenched in rain and mud and sweat and maybe blood, and he says, "Lu, you've gotten to be an improper young lady -" before she flies into his arms, hugs him back.

Peter smiles as he holds her, the softest look they've ever seen on his face. When she pulls back, now shivering from the chill of his wet uniform, she says, "Ed?"

Pevensie gives her a look up and down, says, "You look like you just pulled yourself out of a frozen river."

"Only because you couldn't do it first," she giggles.

"You should've held on! Do you know how scared I was -"

But she cuts him off, her eyes lighting up as she flings herself at Edmund Pevensie more happily than they've ever seen anyone greet him. There's such a gentle smile on his lips that Lack faints from shock (or maybe just the cold or the blood that's been sheeting out of his leg).

The girl pulls back and pushes at his chest. "Where've you been? Couldn't write more than once a year -"

"I've been busy, haven't I?"

"- have to get all my news from Peter, who just says all's fine and send my love -"

"I was bringing up the rear, it's an important job -"

"- then you show up in the middle of Cyprus with a body and two injured men!"

Peter laughs. "Lucy, everyone," he says, throwing his arms out as though introducing her for a performance.

The last Pevensie. Lucy, who smiles like she's still five years old but was cavalier about directing a body bag and a wounded soldier. 

What must have happened to these four as children to make them so hardened to suffering?

And what must have happened to the only one left alive after a bomb dropped on the hospital?

**Author's Note:**

> edmund being secret service is inspired by the series 'National Service' which you should all check out!
> 
> this is basically like anything prince caspian on didn't happen so the problem of Susan doesn't exist... or does it? discuss that in the comments w/ me if you so wish.


End file.
